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Indian ISPs ordered to block blogs?

Submitted by Karthik on 18 July, 2006 - 09:49

It appears that ISPs all across India have been ordered by the Indian government to block a number of key websites on the Internet.

ISPs are believed to have been asked to block sites like bloodspot.com, hinduhumanrights.org, hinduuni-ty.org and clickatell.com, besides frontline blogs like the Google-owned blogsp-ot.com. Deepak Maheshwari, secretary of ISP Association of India said: “We have received a letter from DoT, asking us to block around 18 URLs.”

Though the communication, dated July 13, by the telcom department to ISPs lists specific pages/ websites, several ISPs have blocked all blogs because they were not equipped to filter specific pages. This could be because all websites hosted on blogspot.com, for instance, have the same IP address.

Officials defended the decision saying, "We would like those people to come forward who access these (the 12) radical websites and please explain to us what are they missing from their lives in the absence of these sites."

The list of domains (or subdomains / IPs) blocked apparently include the following:

The Indian blogosphere have set up a Google group named the Bloggers Collective to exchange information and attempt to tackle this issue.

In 2003, the Indian government similarly ordered a nationwide ban on the Yahoo! Groups mailing list for a minor Meghalayan separatist group named Kynhun. That order resulted in the entire groups.yahoo.com domain being inaccessible for a number of months. Ironically, said mailing list is accessible right now.

Sources: Financial Express, Rediff, Hindustan Times.